Who is F5?

Application Services Update: In search of visibility

Lori MacVittie

November 08, 2018

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It’s time again to dig into the application services organizations are actually using to make apps faster and safer.

Of note this quarter again is a continuing rise in use of bot defense services (up another 1%). Security application services held firm, showing no losses or gains, but acceleration again slowed down (pun intended). The rise and fall of acceleration services appears to be seasonal. Expect to see a rise again next quarter as we head into the heavily digital holiday season.

This quarter, analytics-related services caught my eye. A trip down memory lane and four years of data discovered a steady growth.

This should not be surprising given that 74% of organizations in our State of Application Delivery 2018 survey told us that analytics was important to the operation of their infrastructure. Year over year we see continued growth and use stats and analytics related capabilities, which serve to increase visibility. Survey after survey reinforces this finding with “lack of visibility” cited as an impediment and challenge to everything from cloud migration to comprehensive security.

We’ll continue to track this trend and expect to see it continue to climb steadily upward as machine learning and big (operational) data become indispensable to scaling IT operations.

The application services represented are not all inclusive; it is a sample based on data compiled from iHealth over the course of the previous 3-month quarter.

DEFEND

BOT DEFENSE UP AGAIN

Bot defense gained 1% again over last quarter, growing from 21% to 22% of organizations employing it to defend against malicious non-human traffic.

Research from F5 Labs proposed that half of all Internet traffic originates with bots. Nearly one third (30%) of these are malicious.

CONTROL & PROTECT

SECURITY STANDS FIRM

Use of application access and web single-sign on services were steady quarter over quarter, as was web security usage.

Analysis from F5 labs revealed that applications and identities were the initial targets in 86% of breaches, making these application services critical.

ACCELERATE

REDUCING SPEED

Web acceleration and HTTP compression services each lost previous gains, dropping from 39% to 37% and 44% to 42% respectively.